Liberty, Slavery, and the Long Fight for an American Conscience

George Cassidy Payne

Rochester knows something about divided houses.

This city sits in the Genesee Country, once Seneca territory, shaped by abolitionists and suffragists, by Frederick Douglass’ North Star, by churches that doubled as organizing hubs, and by neighborhoods still bearing the scars of redlining, incarceration, and disinvestment. When we revisit the American Revolution—not as myth, but as moral struggle—we are not merely studying the past. We are tracing the roots of contradictions that remain very much alive today.

My reflections come from watching Ken Burns’ The American Revolution on PBS. This is not nostalgia or pageantry. It is an exploration of the uneasy birth of an American conscience, one forged in resistance, hypocrisy, courage, and fear.

In the decade before Lexington and Concord, British law in the colonies rested on a quiet but explosive contradiction: judges swore loyalty not to the communities they governed, but to a distant crown. Courts enforced imperial authority even when it clashed with local values and rights.

For colonists who believed liberty was inherent—not granted—this arrangement became intolerable. As one patriot warned, “Let not the iron hand of tyranny ravish our laws.”

Yet Rochester has learned, time and again, that liberty is never only a political question. It is a moral one. And moral questions have a way of exposing truths people would rather ignore.

When Samuel Adams declared that Americans would be “either free men or slaves,” he voiced the Revolution’s deepest hypocrisy. Freedom was being defended in a land where human beings were bought, sold, beaten, and erased.

That contradiction had names, faces, and voices.

No figure embodied it more powerfully than Phillis Wheatley Peters. Enslaved, educated, celebrated, and endlessly scrutinized, Wheatley became living proof that the racist logic justifying bondage was a lie. Taken as a sickly child from West Africa and purchased “for a trifle,” she was expected to die. Instead, she mastered Milton, Pope, Virgil, and Ovid, writing poetry that stunned New England elites and London intellectuals alike.

Her Poems on Various Subjects crossed the Atlantic, an extraordinary feat for any writer of the 18th century, and unprecedented for a Black woman in chains. Abolitionists hailed her as evidence that intellect and artistry reside in every human soul.

That legacy is not distant for Rochester. Our city deliberately named a public library after Phillis Wheatley—a rare act of civic memory. The Phillis Wheatley Community Library, located at 33 Dr. Samuel McCree Way in the historic Corn Hill neighborhood, stands as a quiet rebuke to the nation’s original hypocrisy: an enslaved Black poet, once forced to prove her humanity before white judges, now remembered as a steward of knowledge, imagination, and public life. In a city shaped by Douglass and abolitionist struggle, Wheatley’s name on a library is not symbolic; it is corrective.

Even some revolutionary leaders sensed the danger. Benjamin Rush warned that “the plant of liberty cannot thrive in the neighborhood of slavery.” Abigail Adams understood that a republic built on natural rights could not indefinitely deny humanity to millions. The moral reckoning had begun long before independence was declared.

We must also confront what the Revolution could not say about itself. The British did not fight primarily to enforce abstract ideals; they fought to protect the enormous profits of Caribbean colonies: Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados—where sugar, slavery, and trade dwarfed the value of the American colonies. London did not want independence to spread; preserving the slave economy overseas was a clear priority.

Colonists, meanwhile, dreamed of expansion. They sought lands long inhabited by Indigenous nations, including the Seneca of the Genesee Country. Parliament tried to block that expansion to preserve British trade monopolies and Native alliances, enraging settlers who equated freedom with land. In other words, the Revolution was as much about moral principles as it was about economic and geographic friction.

By 1773, resistance turned combustible. Tea—taxed without consent—became a symbol of all that Parliament refused to hear. From Charleston to Philadelphia to Boston, crowds demanded it be returned.

Boston radicals escalated, disguising themselves as Native Americans to dump thousands of pounds of tea into the harbor. It was no random destruction. It was a declaration: imperial authority no longer inspired obedience.

What followed was uglier. Loyalists were tarred, feathered, humiliated, dragged through streets. Violence, condemned by some, revealed a deeper shift: America had lost its fear. Rochester knows this moment, too—the instant when trust collapses and communities decide institutions no longer serve them. In 1964 and again in 1967, riots erupted here after long-simmering racial injustice and police violence boiled over, leaving neighborhoods scarred and communities demanding moral as well as political change.

London responded with the Coercive Acts, closing Boston’s port and placing the city under military rule. Intended to isolate Massachusetts, they instead unified the colonies. Judges were expelled. Courts closed. Militias grew. Towns organized minutemen, ready at a moment’s notice.

When the First Continental Congress convened, Patrick Henry captured the shift: “I am not a Virginian. I am an American.” Revolution was no longer a debate; it had become a culture.

On April 19, 1775, British troops marched toward Concord. Shots rang out at Lexington Green. No one ever agreed who fired first.

John Adams knew immediately there was no turning back. The causes of revolution, he wrote, were “like a cancer… too far spread and entrenched.” The war would last eight years. But morally, everything changed that day.

The American Revolution was never a clean story of liberty triumphing over tyranny. It birthed a nation that declared itself free while denying freedom to many within its borders. Yet those contradictions planted seeds. The language of equality and human dignity would fuel abolition, suffrage, labor struggles, civil rights movements, and today’s fights for justice.

Colonial Americans resisted judges who served distant power rather than the people. Today, attacks on judicial independence pose a similar threat. Courts remain one of the few effective checks on executive overreach. For that, judges have been targeted, delegitimized, and threatened. Rochester residents understand what’s at stake. When courts lose independence, marginalized communities lose protection first. Liberty does not survive on rhetoric alone; it depends on institutions brave enough to defend it.

Ken Burns and his team have lifted the veil. The American Revolution was not only a struggle for liberty, it was also a struggle over slavery, over who counted as human, and over the profits of empire. The same contradictions that fueled rebellion then continue to shape us now: the tension between ideals and interests, between expansion and justice, between liberty and oppression. Recognizing that truth is not a detraction from the Revolution; it is an invitation to engage with its full moral complexity—and to carry its unfinished work forward.

For African Americans and other communities of color living in Rochester today, understanding this history is inherently empowering. Learning the real story of our nation, the courage, the hypocrisy, the moral reckoning, helps all of us know who we are as a citizenry and what freedom truly means. It gives context to the struggles faced today and the institutions that must be held accountable. Liberty is not abstract; it is a living principle that must be defended wherever power threatens to erode it—whether in Washington, Albany, City Hall, or our own school boards.

A house divided cannot stand. But a people willing to confront their contradictions—and to insist that liberty and justice apply to all—just might.

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George Cassidy Payne is a journalist, poet, and disability advocate based in Rochester, New York. He is a 988 Suicide Prevention Counselor, a nonprofit creative strategist, and a community organizer, with two master’s degrees in the humanities. His work focuses on social justice, ethics, and the intersection of language, policy, and human dignity.